Chương 27: 26: The Somnambulist

Korhess lowered her spear and watched in steady silence, waiting to see whether Butter would rise or not. Then she began walking forward. Clop. Clop. Clop. The sound of her hooves echoed through the chamber. She stopped beside the unconscious girl, looked down at the prosthetic, and after a moment's consideration reached down and pulled it free. The limb detached with a metallic hiss. Korhess raised it one-handed. An eyebrow lifted. Then she let go. THOOOM!

The prosthetic struck the floor, and a crater nearly forty meters wide exploded outward. Korhess frowned. The floor here was absurdly durable. Throughout their battle, shockwaves capable of erasing mountains had been forced into submission by the chamber's construction. Outside, entire landscapes would have vanished beneath the force of their exchanges. Yet this thing had cratered the floor simply by being dropped. Slowly, Korhess bent down and picked it back up. Genuine strain crossed her features. It was heavy.

She searched for a comparison. A skyscraper perhaps. One of the largest imaginable, filled with people, and even that felt insufficient.

"How," she muttered, staring at the prosthetic, "has thee been carrying this around?" The question received no answer. Carefully, she lowered it back to the ground. This time she controlled the descent. Her attention returned to Butter. The spear rose, its tip settling against the unconscious girl's throat. For a moment Korhess simply stood there, considering. Katherine swallowed. Korhess was too strong. Too skilled.

Butter had been on the defensive from the moment the fight began, and every exchange only proved the gap between them. She had to do something. Anything. She couldn't allow this. Katherine took a steadying breath, emerged from her hiding place, and walked into the open. Her knees threatened to buckle, but she kept going until she stood where Korhess couldn't possibly ignore her. Her hand found a pebble. She threw it. Tink. The pebble bounced harmlessly off Korhess's head.

"Leave my friend alone, evil deer lady!" Slowly, Korhess turned, annoyance flickering across her face.

"First of all," she began, already preparing to correct the woman, "I am not a-" The words died. A brief silence followed. Korhess blinked. Her ears twitched.

"…A deer?" Katherine stared. Korhess stared back. Genuine confusion displaced the irritation. Most people called her a horse. Or a goat. Occasionally a llama. Once, inexplicably, a decorative curtain rack. But deer? That was actually correct. Korhess disliked how pleased she felt about that. Her expression immediately soured.

"Ahem." She took a single step and was suddenly standing beside Katherine. One hand lifted her effortlessly into the air as her mismatched eyes stared into hers. Katherine whimpered. Then, to Korhess's utter confusion, she reached into her gown. The spear tensed. Instead of a weapon, Katherine produced a packet of cookies. She tore it open and flung it across the chamber. The cookies scattered near Butter. Silence. Korhess blinked, then frowned deeply. She placed the spear beneath Katherine's chin.

"What," she asked, "was that?" A strange sound answered her. Sniff. Korhess's ears perked. Sniff. Both women looked toward Butter. The unconscious girl was moving. Her severed stump had already begun regenerating, flesh knitting together as a new leg emerged, yet her eyes remained closed. Sniff. Sniff. Like a hunting animal following a scent. Butter's hand found a cookie. Crunch. Then another. Crunch. She rose unsteadily to her feet, swaying from side to side while continuing to chew. A sleepwalker eating cookies.

Korhess slowly lowered Katherine. The situation had somehow become more concerning. The spear shot forward. She could not permit this to continue. Whatever reluctance she felt was irrelevant. Her loyalty belonged to the Syndicate. The blade lunged for Butter's heart. Butter wasn't there. Korhess froze. A presence rested against her back. Warm. Soft. Leaning on her for balance. Butter stood directly behind her, eyes still closed, chewing lazily, back to back with her, a cookie dangling from her mouth.

Korhess's pupils contracted. Not Moth-Step. Something worse. Common sense arrived all at once. What happened when one removed millions of tons of weight from a body? They became faster.

"By the stars...." Korhess spun. The spear cut through nothing. She flooded herself with Apis. Speed multiplied. Then multiplied again. Then again. The chamber blurred. Korhess attacked. And ran face-first into a kick. KRAAASH! The impact blasted her backward across the chamber. She dug in her hooves and forced control over the descent, only to realize she was no longer standing. A bare foot rested atop her chest. Cookie crumbs drifted downward. One landed on her nose. Another on her forehead.

Butter swayed gently above her, eyes still closed, lazily chewing. The pressure beneath that foot increased. The floor cratered. Korhess was driven deeper into the ground. No technique. No strategy. No conscious thought. Only pure speed, pure instinct, pure muscle memory. And somehow that terrified Korhess more than anything Butter had shown while awake. A somnambulist. The old word surfaced unbidden in her mind, born from the Latin somnus - sleep - and ambulare - to walk. A sleepwalker.

Except Butter had taken it far beyond its original meaning. Years of relentless training had carved movements so deeply into her body that thought had become unnecessary. Her muscles remembered. Her nerves remembered. Even asleep, they executed techniques with flawless precision. Katherine could only stare. Butter's eyes remained closed. Her face was peaceful, almost childlike, yet her body flowed from strike to strike without the slightest hesitation, each movement folding seamlessly into the next.

It wasn't fighting. It was a reverie dance, a waking dream where body and instinct moved together beyond conscious thought. Slowly, Butter leaned down and extended a hand. Korhess stared. A half-eaten cookie sat between Butter's fingers, thoroughly soaked with saliva. Korhess felt a sudden, unfamiliar emotion. Horror. She pushed the cookie toward Korhess's mouth, she turned her head away. The cookie followed.

"What art thou doing?"

"Have..." Butter mumbled. The cookie pressed against her lips.

"... some..."

"Absolutely not." Korhess tried to rise. The result shocked her. She didn't move. Her muscles flexed. The chamber trembled. Nothing happened. That was impossible. She could lift galaxies. Even without Apis, her strength bordered on the absurd. Her eyes shifted downward. Gloom. Red, blue, and yellow light flared around Butter's leg. Reality bent. Persuaded. For this moment, Butter was stronger. The universe accepted the argument. Korhess did not. Unfortunately, the universe's opinion mattered more.

The foot descended another inch. KRRRRAAAK. Korhess sank deeper into the crater, pinned like an insect beneath glass. Her ears flattened.

"Release me this instant."

"Mmh." Butter shoved the cookie into her mouth. Korhess immediately tried to spit it out. Another cookie appeared.

"No."

"Have... some..." The second cookie followed the first. Korhess's muffled protest was cut off by baked goods. Cookie crumbs scattered across her scarf. A third followed. Then a fourth. The First Antler. The Final Obstacle. Legend of the Syndicate. Pinned beneath a sleepwalking woman and being force-fed soggy cookies. Katherine watched in silence, then quietly looked away. Some humiliations deserved privacy. — Korhess's composure finally cracked. This novel's true home is a different platform.

Support the author by finding it there. Blue-gold mist swallowed her form. FWSSSH. Katherine's eyes widened.

"She can teleport...?" Instinct took over. She staggered backward, retreating deeper behind the shattered wall until only one eye peeked around the edge, her pulse suddenly hammering in her ears. Korhess reappeared directly behind Butter, teleportation collapsing distance into irrelevance, a hoof already swinging for the back of the girl's skull. Her mismatched eyes narrowed. Butter didn't predict attacks. She felt them.

Every shift in pressure, vibration, and fluctuation reached those impossible senses before an attack ever landed, letting her move as though she already knew what was coming. Korhess fought differently. The future unfolded before her in endless branching possibilities, every strike timed against what would happen rather than what already had. Ordinarily, that should've given her the advantage. Except Butter wasn't ordinary.

Even asleep, steady pulses of Gloom leaked from her body, spreading through reality like invisible waves that blurred causality itself. To Korhess's foresight, Butter looked like an object hidden behind dense mist, every future shimmering and refusing to stay fixed.... She never did this while awake. Sleep had stripped away conscious restraint, letting Gloom bleed freely. Korhess tightened her grip.

At these speeds, the slightest hesitation was fatal, and she couldn't afford even a fraction of a second trying to see through the haze. Butter caught it before the strike could reach full momentum. Jeet Kune Do distilled into instinct. Her hand touched Korhess's leg at exactly the right moment, disrupting balance and stealing structure. Korhess was flung sideways before the kick could mature. She twisted through the air and flicked her spear. SHOOM! Butter tilted her head. The blade missed by millimeters.

Korhess stretched out her palm. The spear reversed instantly, returning like a hunting hawk. Its path should have caught Butter between departure and arrival. It caught nothing. Korhess frowned as the spear slapped back into her grasp. A small weight rested atop it. Butter. Balanced casually on the very tip of the returning spear, her foot shimmering with Gloom. Drool hung from the corner of her mouth. Across the chamber, another Butter stood half asleep, staring blankly at nothing. The cookies were gone.

That seemed to upset her. The first image dissolved. Already gone. Korhess's eye twitched.

"Enough." Apis flooded her body. Speed multiplied, then multiplied again, and again. Reality groaned beneath the escalation. Eventually the acceleration stopped, not because Korhess wished it to, but because existence refused further nonsense. A vigintillion times the speed of light - 10⁶³ times faster than light, a number requiring sixty-three zeros to write.

In a single second, light travels about 300 million meters; this would cross roughly 3 × 10⁷¹ meters, making the observable universe seem smaller than a grain of dust by comparison. Anything beyond that became absurdity even Apis struggled to justify. Beyond that point, even dream logic encountered resistance. At such velocities, Planck time itself ceased being a useful measurement.

A careless step could send her through dimensions, across galaxies, or into mathematical regions of reality that had no business containing matter. Only Apis and Gloom translated the madness into something their minds could perceive. Now Korhess could see. Butter moved. Korhess met her. The spear vanished from consideration. Hand to hand. No flames. No tricks. Only skill. Butter's fists erupted into chain punches.

Korhess slipped sideways, narrowly sidestepping one punch before driving a savage uppercut into Butter's elbow. CRACK. Butter's arm broke at the elbow, the forearm folding grotesquely as it dangled uselessly for the briefest instant. Korhess's fingers immediately shot toward her abdomen, grasping strikes flowing into a ripping motion meant to tear something from inside her body. Butter intercepted with Jeet Kune Do, her remaining arm cutting across the line of attack in the shortest possible motion.

Gloom surged through the shattered limb. Bone snapped back into alignment. Tendons reknit. Flesh sealed. By the time Korhess's second strike arrived, Butter's arm was already whole again. Butter caught the hands and shifted. Korhess's fingers immediately shot for her abdomen, grasping strikes following the motion of ripping something from inside her body. Butter caught the hands and shifted. Shaolin animal forms flowed through her limbs. Tiger into crane. Crane into monkey. Monkey into mantis.

The sleepwalking state had somehow refined her technique even further. Korhess lashed out, but Butter killed the impact before it could mature. Korhess answered with Asherah's Waltz, and the chamber dissolved into hand-to-hand violence. Butter's fists blurred with every strike. Not speed alone - multiplication. Each punch fractured into dozens of impacts layered atop one another, Crescendo building with every connection. A jab became ten. A hook became twenty.

A palm strike landed like an entire combination compressed into a single instant. Korhess saw it happening and refused to let the sequence continue. Tiger claw met deer-step. Butter raked for her throat. Korhess pivoted outside the line, seized the wrist, and tried to tear the arm from its socket. Butter folded around the grab like water, planting both palms against Korhess's shoulder and vaulting over her head. Monkey. A heel dropped toward Korhess's crown. Korhess spun beneath it. Crane.

Butter landed on one foot, the other already lashing out. Korhess caught the kick under her forearm and answered with a thrusting hoof. Butter slapped it aside. Mantis. Her fingers darted for pressure points. Korhess knocked one hand away, trapped the second, and drove an elbow toward Butter's jaw. Butter ducked underneath it. Tiger again. A barrage erupted. Dozens of fists. Dozens of impacts. Crescendo climbed. Korhess flowed backward, every retreat secretly an attack. A shoulder bump became a sweep.

A sweep became a knee. A knee became a spinning backfist. Butter slipped through all three. For a heartbeat they occupied the same space, exchanging strikes too quickly for Katherine to perceive. THUK. KRAK. WHAM. Neither yielded. With every blurred strike Butter landed, Korhess could feel Crescendo climbing higher and higher, approaching the point where even she would no longer be able to ignore it. Then Butter did something strange. She casually waved a fist in front of Korhess's face.

Red-blue-yellow Gloom sprayed through the air like mist. Korhess immediately lost sight. Lost sound. Blind. Deaf. The world vanished. Apis surged instinctively to compensate, but the delay was enough. KRAAACK! An elbow slammed into the back of her head. For the first time in the exchange, the impact actually hurt. Crescendo had grown. Korhess staggered forward, one hand shooting to the back of her skull as Apis flooded her senses, burning away the interference. Understanding struck a moment later.

Butter could persuade reality. She could declare herself stronger, faster, more durable. If it were truly that simple, Korhess would already be dead. The realization settled coldly into place. There was a cost. A limit. Gloom could bend reality, but not infinitely. Not against something built over decades of accumulation. Butter couldn't simply overwhelm thirty-five years of growth with a passing thought. Which meant every shortcut she took carried a price. Korhess smiled despite the pain.

Then she exploded into motion. Her entire body collapsed into a blur of grasping hands, fingers snapping out in predatory patterns as Apis flooded her palms. Each strike sought not flesh, but the Gloom itself, reaching to tear it free from Butter's body. Butter spun. The Aria twirled once in her hand. It opened. Only a crack. Something enormous pushed through. A pair of giant yellow-furred kangaroo legs covered in swirling red patterns exploded from the opening and kicked. BOOOOOM!

The impact blasted Korhess backward with impossible force. She rolled with the momentum, skidding across the chamber before recovering her footing. By then the Aria had already snapped shut, whatever lurked inside retreating before it could fully manifest. Confusion crossed Korhess's face.

"… What...?" She stared at the innocent-looking book in Butter's hand. That thing... Whatever had just kicked her possessed strength bordering on the absurd, and Butter had been carrying it around inside a book as though it were perfectly ordinary. What else was hidden within those pages? Around them, the chamber seemed to breathe again as both women eased back to ordinary speeds.

The blurred afterimages vanished, the air stopped shrieking, and the ruined laboratory finally became visible instead of a smear of fractured stone. Katherine's eyes widened.

"What was that?!" She looked from the closed Aria to Butter, excitement quickly replacing her shock. Without another word... Korhess surged forward again. Pain detonated up her leg. She looked down. A red scorpion clung to her hoof. She stomped. The creature burst into mist. The agony remained. Veins bulged across her neck as unbearable stinging flooded her nervous system. It hadn't truly damaged her. It hadn't even pierced her defenses. The pain itself was the attack. Korhess groaned. Butter was already there.

Tiger became crane. Crane became eagle. Her hand shot forward in an Eagle Claw strike, fingers hooked and aiming straight for Korhess's eyes. Korhess vacated the destination. She slipped outside Butter's sightline, denying range and denying rhythm. A hoof shot toward Butter's temple. Butter slapped it downward and used the motion to launch herself upward. Korhess staggered. A knee flashed toward her face. She leaned back, caught the kneecap, and ripped it free. CRUNCH. Katherine saw it happen. Move!

Her mind screamed. Butter! Dodge! Move! Please! She could follow every horrifying instant, but her body lagged hopelessly behind. Her lips refused to form the warning. Her voice never came. The joint shattered inside Korhess's fist. At the same time, Apis pulsed through her body in precise waves. Decades of practice condensed into instinct.

The impossible agony left by the scorpion's sting unraveled as it traveled through her, broken apart and redistributed until the pain became little more than a rumor moving through distant nerves. Butter didn't react to the missing kneecap. She spun anyway, momentum carrying her through the air as though the injury had never existed. Butter entered a bicycle kick. Then smacked Korhess across the face with her own detached lower leg. The absurdity of it caught Korhess completely off guard. WHACK.

Blood sprayed into her eyes. Gloom lingering as it splashed across her face, crawling over her skin for the briefest moment before Apis surged outward and forcibly stripped it away. Butter landed in a handspring, leaning on one leg, still dozing off. Korhess growled. A hoof slammed into the floor. KRAAAK! The impact never touched Butter. The ground did.

Katherine's eyes widened in disbelief as the tremor raced through the earth beneath Butter, reverberating upward through her body before her remaining leg exploded apart with a sickening crack. She... broke her through the ground...? Korhess seized the opening. Her spear returned. SHOOOM! The blade drove toward Butter's chest. Butter caught it with her palm. The spear punched through her hand entirely, but she twisted and locked it in place. Melody wrapped around the weapon, holding it, pinning it.

Her legs were already growing back. A foot flicked out. THUNK. Korhess stumbled sideways. Pressure point. It did no real damage. Her durability remained untouched. Yet a knot of discomfort bloomed along the side of her neck, an irritating thorn lodged somewhere beneath muscle and tendon that refused to settle. Merely annoyance. Which, somehow, made it worse. Butter landed lightly. Both legs were whole again, fresh Gloom having quietly rebuilt what Korhess had destroyed.

She dropped into stance and punched the spear once. The concept of motion around it shattered. The weapon simply stopped. Korhess didn't hesitate. She surged forward, her hoof carving through the air in a brutal downward strike meant to pulp Butter where she stood. Then she staggered. Just a fraction. Butter's earlier pressure-point strike rippled through her body, disrupting the flow of Apis for the briefest instant. It was almost imperceptible. For fighters moving at their level...... it was far too long.

Butter moved. She collapsed into an impossibly loose motion, throwing herself flat onto the floor. Her back skimmed the stone as she spun beneath Korhess's center of gravity, one hand catching her foreleg while the other hooked behind it. Korhess's balance disappeared. The world flipped. She crashed onto her back. Before she could process the fall, Butter had already wrapped herself around her.

One leg cinched around Korhess's waist, the other locked across her ribs, while both arms snaked beneath her jaw and locked together in a savage headlock. Korhess understood instantly. This wasn't a choke. Oxygen meant nothing to her. Apis handled that automatically. Butter's Gloom flooded her forearms, compressing into a line no thicker than a wire.

Rather than overpowering Korhess's entire body, it focused everything onto the narrow strip of flesh trapped between her arms, like a wire sawing through plate armor instead of trying to crush the armor itself. She was trying to tear Korhess's head clean off. Korhess snarled, forced herself upright, and hurled herself backward, intending to smash Butter into the chamber wall. Butter vibrated. The wall offered no resistance. Both of them slipped straight through solid matter. Stars exploded into view.

The chamber fell away behind them. By the time Korhess realized what had happened, they were already galaxies away, drifting through the void before she could even begin slowing herself. Korhess staggered, Apis surging as she tore herself free of the Gloom constricting her neck. Butter released the hold. Korhess spun in place, searching for the laboratory, the planet, anything familiar. There was nothing. Only stars. Endless darkness scattered with distant suns. Her eyes narrowed.

"… We're far from home." The realization settled instantly. There was nothing left to protect. No chamber to preserve. No planet to worry about. No collateral to restrain her. She stopped holding back. Her hands came together. POW. The shockwave exploded across the void. Multiple solar systems disappeared beneath the expanding wall of force. Planets fragmented into incandescent dust. Moons unraveled.

Asteroid belts scattered like grains of sand, while nearby stars collapsed before erupting into expanding clouds of stellar fire. Butter was already gone. Silence reclaimed the void. Korhess's instincts screamed. A teleport. FWSSSH. She appeared above Butter, already hurling an Apis-saturated asteroid across space. Butter's fists blurred. THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.

Dozens of punches landed before the mountain-sized mass reached her, bursting it into a cloud of molten fragments that flashed harmlessly around her like fireworks. Then came the moon. A colossal sphere of rock, thousands of kilometers across, screamed through the debris, its crust laced with dense streams of Apis that held the celestial body together against the impossible forces acting upon it.

Before something that vast, Butter was microscopic, a lone white figure before a wall of stone large enough to eclipse the stars. The next move was almost laughably simple. One of the first techniques she'd ever mastered. A strike once used to split boulders, then buildings, then mountains cleanly in half without Gloom. This wasn't a mountain. It was a moon. Ordinarily, the difference would've been impossible. Yet Crescendo had climbed throughout the battle.

Being knocked unconscious had reset it, but every exchange since had doubled the force behind the next. It was enough. Butter didn't call upon Gloom. Only pure prowess. She flowed into Shaolin's Whirlwind Split. Her stance settled. She spun once. Twice. Three times. Each rotation gathered more momentum than the last as a precise shift compressed that vast ocean of force into a single razor-thin line, abandoning breadth for absolute focus. One arm swept through a perfect arc. SHRAAAK.

A shimmering seam raced across the moon. Mountains split. Dust seas parted. Craters tore open as an invisible fracture carved from pole to pole. The moon split cleanly in half. Korhess stopped. She had never seen technique alone do that. For one impossible heartbeat, the hemispheres drifted apart in utter silence, a hair-thin gulf stretching between them while sunlight poured through the newborn canyon. Then the Apis-reinforced mass surrendered.

Both halves burst into billions of incandescent fragments, flooding the void with a storm of molten debris. Korhess lunged through the expanding cloud. Her hand closed around Butter's leg.

"It's no use. Thou art finished." She swung. Butter became a violent streak, hurled straight into a nearby planet. Before Korhess's mind could register the throw, Butter reversed the grip, flowed around her arm, and latched onto her instead. One hand locked Korhess's wrist. The other seized her shoulder. Butter's foot planted against the back of Korhess's head as she twisted, pinning both of Korhess's arms in place before driving her face-first into the world below. The planet folded inward beneath the impact.

KRAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAK. Continents collapsed around Korhess's skull. Mantle became core. Core became empty space. They burst from the opposite side trailing oceans, magma, and shattered crust. Korhess barely had time to orient herself. Butter's heel crashed into her jaw. BOOM. The kick launched her across the cosmos in a perfectly straight line. Planets burst apart against her body. Stars billowed around her in expanding infernos. Entire systems blurred past before she finally fought the momentum to a stop.

Korhess drew a slow breath as Apis steadied her thoughts. She calmly dusted off her clothes, produced a small mirror, and adjusted her makeup. Only then did she look around. She was standing inside a star. Rivers of white-gold plasma rolled around her ankles. Magnetic arcs danced across her body. Every breath tasted of fusion. Molten plasma rolled around her in luminous tides, bathing her skin in gold. Korhess took a slow, measured breath.

"…She split a moon." Technique alone. Just a single movement executed so perfectly that a celestial body had parted before it. A faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

"The girl is skilled." The smile grew.

"A worthy adversary." Her mismatched eyes drifted through the stellar fire, remembering the effortless flow of Butter's movements.

"…A true dancer." The old word surfaced in her mind. The Somnambulist. Korhess closed her eyes for a moment. Blue-gold mist enveloped her. FWSSSH. She teleported. Back into the chamber. Butter was already waiting there.